Mix of Metal and Graphene Cools Chips

Engineers at North Carolina State Univeristy report in Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B that they’ve found a better way to get the heat out of ICs. They say that flakes of the 2-dimensional wonder material graphene mixed with either indium or copper conducts heat much better than metal alone. Keeping chips cool lets you run them at a higher clock rate. In fact, how much heat chips generate was one of the motivations to moving from high-clock rate single core processors to lower clock-rate multicore ones. The NC State researchers were working on a part of the chip package called a heat spreader. This is a layer of copper that conducts heat away from hot spots on the chip, evening out the overall temperature, and passing the heat on to a fin-shaped heat sink. The graphene-copper composite conducted heat well enough to cool 25 percent faster than pure copper (at roo...